Mayor vows to clean up Mid-Market — again!

Mayors dating back to at least Dianne Feinstein have vowed to turn the beleaguered stretch of Market Street between Fifth Street and Van Ness Avenue into a world-class thoroughfare, but anybody who’s walked through the seedy area lately knows the dream has never materialized.

But this time is different, Mayor Gavin Newsom promised today. Standing in a packed Show Dogs, a new upscale hot dog joint at Sixth Street and Market, Newsom ticked off a host of initiatives he says will at long last improve the blighted area.

“This is not the Champs Elysses,” Newsom said, referring to the upscale, beautiful boulevard in Paris and also making perhaps the biggest political understatement of the new year.

“I’ve got two years left, and I don’t want to be just another mayor who didn’t deliver on Market Street,” Newsom said.

Perhaps most notable was the mayor’s pledge to dust off the redevelopment plan for the area that was scuttled by the Board of Supervisors in 2005 because of disagreements over the appropriate levels of affordable housing.

Asked how the same plan can this time be approved by a similarly left-leaning board, Newsom said, “Well, I don’t know, term limits?” The quip was taken by many in attendance as a jab at Supervisor Chris Daly – the Newsom nemesis, Mid-Market representative and affordable housing champion who is termed out of office in a year.

Daly said his successor will likely be a strong proponent of affordable housing, too, and said of Newsom’s take-two, “It’s likely not to go anywhere.”